


To thine arm alone

by Lilliburlero



Category: Henry V - Shakespeare
Genre: Anglo-Welsh Relations, Class Differences, Consent Issues, Cultural Differences, Dubious Consent, Historical, Implied Poins, M/M, Medieval, Military
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-18
Updated: 2014-01-18
Packaged: 2018-01-08 23:38:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138812
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are worse things than being the butt of the King's unfunny practical jokes.</p><p>*</p><p>Content warning for distinctly dubious sexual consent and abuse of power.  No explicit description of sexual violence, but some potentially distressing material.</p><p>*</p><p>thanks to angevin2 and reconditarmonia for beta-reading.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To thine arm alone

**Author's Note:**

  * For [reconditarmonia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/reconditarmonia/gifts).



> This emerged from a request on Tumblr, which in turn came from this [headcanon meme](http://lilliburlero.tumblr.com/post/73089866672/fluellen-queerness-if-thats-something-that-can-be). 
> 
> I imagine that this exists in a slight AU from my other, happier, stories about Fluellen and Gower, but there's no material difference between the universes.

It’s one of Gower’s wise saws: _if you can still actually_ say _it’s the fucking pits, it isn’t, not yet._ He doesn’t want to think about Gower. It’s only hours since he saw the spark of comprehension smoulder into eager acquiescence in his green-brown eyes. He pushes the image away with the phrase _bit of rough._ It’s a stupid lie.  He doesn’t court his rough with fragments of the _Confessio Amantis_ (which didn’t make an impression anyway) and the gestes of Alexander (which did). He doesn’t, bar a pint of wine or a quart of strong ale, a plate of oysters and a discreet but direct enquiry, court his rough at all.  And he has no taste for anything that savours of compulsion, so the objects of this spartan wooing are exclusively civilian.  Gower is something else. He isn’t sure what exactly, but now he’ll never have a chance to find out. He doesn't know how he can ever look Gower in the eye again, let alone renew that tender understanding, after the King himself has made sport of him, after he has compounded the mortification with an idiot blunder of his own. Whatever had possessed him, to offer a shilling to a man so fulsomely and impulsively enriched? The worst of it is that Gower would let him down gently. Scorn he might be able to endure: pity, never. Better to let it drop. The resolution leaves him cold, drained and helplessly disbelieving.

And then the herald’s page, a lanky boy already a couple of inches taller than him, lopes up with the King’s command to wait upon him after Mass tomorrow. The lad hangs about.  He disburses twopence and a ferocious look, wondering if he’ll ever be able to tip someone again without blushing to his (fast-receding) hairline, and is ashamed to see no disdain and no cheek, but a standard-issue _situation normal: all fucked up_ in the boy’s shrug of acceptance.

It’s not easy to avoid Gower: tow-haired and fair-skinned, in firelight, he’s six foot and two inches of glowworm. Less easy still to avoid his voice, audible a mile off; he’s still giddy with battle-fever, by the sounds of it, augmented by whatever drink they’ve managed to lay their hands on; despite dour and pious prohibition, and draconian threat, there’s been a fair amount of pilfering. If it hadn’t been for the King’s freaks and fancies he’d be draped about Gower’s neck now; telling him to shut the hell up before he gets them all hanged, cloaking public caresses with the excuse of euphoria, falling to it just before dawn under canvas and blankets and not caring if the men guessed what went on because they’d honestly thought that if they met again this night it would be in hell.  Instead, he’s alone in his bed-roll, cock in his spit-wet hand, not even really trying to get himself off because then he’ll feel even bloody worse.

In the morning, he manages to scare up some hot water and wash the visible bits of himself. He combs unspeakable stuff out of his hair: he should crop it, he supposes; it’s a practical fashion, but it would turn his head into a black and grey pissybed blowball. The choice between the suit of grubby, damp, mended, lousy clothes and the suit of filthy, sodden, torn, shit-and blood-stained lousy clothes is invidious but easy.  He goes, in a state of grace, give or take, since he’s not sure exactly _what_ he repented in that general confession, to the King’s pavilion.  There is an antechamber filled with men, mostly of higher rank than he, in various attitudes of mooch.  They couldn’t speak to him without humiliation; he to them without outrage. But five-and-twenty years of soldiery teaches a man, if nothing else, to suffer boredom.  Sub-vocally, he rehearses the whole corpus of his knowledge in the four languages he speaks fluently.  And then he starts to do it again. It is dusk by the time he’s waved through.  He is the last; the others are dismissed to return on the morrow.  He is announced, kneels.  There is a long interval of nothing, during which he feels the chill of the ground rise through the slats of the pavilion floor and his padded hose and settle into his knee-joints, then his _soul_.  Finally, a lazy command to rise.  He panics for a moment: he can’t. His right leg is asleep; yesterday’s bruises yowl in protest.  Then, thankfully, his dead limb starts to make prickly sense; he stumbles to his feet and something like attention. The King hasn’t noticed: he’s scanning documents and appending a grim little poignard of a signature to some of them.  He holds them at a distance in the poor light, which makes him look very much older than his years.

‘At ease. What’s your _name_ , Llewelyn?’

It’s been a long time since anyone here has understood, or rather, has _cared_ to understand―there are enough Welshmen in the army, after all―and he’s flummoxed by it, as well as the unselfconsciously precise initial consonant, which the King has never deployed in front of others. It’s not arrogance, exactly. What for most people in God’s earth is the mere courtesy of an attempt at accurate pronunciation seems to the Englishman intolerable ostentation. Gower knows lots of French, but his refusal to essay the accent means he can’t so much as commandeer a peck of flour or a dozen eggs without causing a riot. It's inconvenient, given they're not supposed to commandeer things at all.  The startlement must show, because the King adds, ‘Feels a bit odd, calling a fellow by his patronymic.’

‘My given name is Gruffydd, your majesty.’

‘Gruffydd ap Llewelyn.  Oh dear.  I think a knotted bedsheet would hold _you_ long enough to escape from the Tower, though.’

‘We’re all thinner than we were, my lord.’

‘He died on St David's day, your namesake, as I recall. Apt. Anything you’d like to escape from, Gruffydd?’  He wonders if the satisfaction of replying _this interview_ would be worth the consequences.  The King is unpredictable: he might even find it funny.

‘No, sir.’

‘Your kinsman fought and fell nobly.’

Gruffydd thinks suddenly and vividly of Gower haranguing the new men: _never contradict, never explain, never volunteer, you hear me? And you’ll be all right, you useless bastards._ That huge reassuring voice.  An account of his family’s fractious association with that of Dafydd Gam ap Llewelyn, with whom they shared little except violent loathing for Owain Glyn Dŵr, probably contravened all three prohibitions. ‘He did, sir. God have mercy on his soul.’  

‘He was loyal to us.’

A servant replaces the paperwork with a dish of land-snails and a carafe of wine.  The King prods at the shells with a tiny shiv, thinner than a fruit-knife and a little thicker than a skewer.  He eats with fastidious precision, leaving long pauses between speeches. Gruffydd thinks it’s a cheap manoeuvre, in contravention of the codes of hospitality and guest-friendship.  He hasn’t eaten since the night before last, or a half-century ago, and he’s all the way through ravenous on the calm, contemplative, woozy other side.

‘How old are you, Gruffydd?’

‘Two score or thereabouts, my lord.’

‘And you came into our service—?’

‘In the ninth year of your father’s reign, my lord.’

‘Tidy.  And before?’

‘Free company, my lord.  Italy mostly.’  It’s hardly warm, but it’s close, and he’s starting to sweat.

‘Long way to go to lease your sword.  Was there no employment at home?’  The King runs the handle of his knife along the knotty scar which hollows his left cheek.  Gruffydd feels a momentary pang for him: that boy’s elementary error had turned an imposing and appealing face into something very nearly monstrous; as a mark of valour, it wouldn’t convince anyone who knew the first and least thing about battle procedure: he must have gone down moments from the start. Not that he hasn’t done plenty in the dozen years since, and not that he’s not lucky to be alive.  He’s seen men, and women too, die slowly, excruciated and rotting, from less, much less.  

‘None I could in conscience take, my lord.’

‘Really.  What a nice conscience you must have.’

‘War is very savage, my lord.  It must be governed by law and discipline. Otherwise we are like the Nephilim, and not God’s creatures at all.’

Henry grunts, as if he is reviewing the scriptural veracity of the comparison and finding it wanting. The servant removes the finished dish and sets down one of sausages. ‘Mustard.  Don’t ever bring us sausages without mustard again,’ he says pleasantly, conversationally, still looking at Gruffydd.  ‘And you didn’t think your discipline should be to defend the law against rebellion?’

‘A soldier’s duty is not always his fortune, sir.  I am not a rich man now, and then I was a very poor one.  I had nothing to bring to my king’s cause.  But it disgusted me that a man should seek to pass off his own petty brawls and babbles as the uprising of a beleaguered nation.’

‘Disgusted you more than treason?’

Gruffydd considers.  He knows only that _no_ is a contemptible answer, and that he would truly rather die than invite more of his king’s contempt.  He hopes it is truly, because he’s about to try it.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Good. You have my attention.’

He gulps.  ‘Men do not commit treason for the good of their health.  It is on the contrary most deleterious to that commodity.  They have grievances, which usually are not wholly fanciful.  They make out of those grievances a cause which they convince themselves and others is just.  The discipline of the thing rests in judging if the cause is indeed just, and that is a better discipline than horror at the mere word treason, which is like tapping a man’s knee and he cannot help it kick.’  He is sweating hard now; he can smell his own fearful stench, and English idiom is slipping away from him.  ‘Owain Glyn Dŵr’s cause was not just, my lord.’

‘And our cause here in France, is it just?’

‘We Welshmen do not recognise the law Salique.  Inheritance through the female line has always been permissible among us.  Desirable, often, my lord.’

Henry laughs.  ‘Desirable, yes indeed.  We had not expected it.  You will take a drink with me.’

Gruffydd reels in this sudden access of approbation, and into the private chamber behind the audience room.  It’s sparsely furnished: a narrow curtained bed, a chest, a small table, a daybed, on which they sit.  Gruffydd wants to examine the hangings, fine Flemish weave, not paintings, but he’s stuck looking at a dull one of the royal arms.  The King is unexpectedly easy company.  He condescends to Gryffudd with some stilted Welsh; but he understands far more than he speaks.  He asks for a poem in Welsh, and Gruffydd, forgetting what they say about the King’s youth, gives him ‘Trafferth mewn tafarn’:

‘―Dihengais i, da wng saint, / I Dduw’r archaf ffaddeuaint.’

Henry giggles, a high-pitched private noise, most unlike the kingly acclamation that instigated this irregular audience. It’s a cold sound, though, as if he’s never sympathised with another man’s misfortune in all his life.  ‘I’ve given my shin the odd bark jumping on joint-stools―used to know a bloke who never missed, drunk as ever he was.  Uncanny.  Of course, it was about all he _could_ do. Quoits.  Can someone cheat at slinging a ring over a pin? He would’ve if you could.  And the most perfectly disgusting things with candle-ends. I say, Gruffydd, what do you know of that Michael Williams fellow?’

Gruffydd had almost relaxed.  He should have known better.  He collects himself.  ‘Very little, sir.  He is Captain Gower’s man.’

‘And you are close to Gower?’

‘He was my particular friend, my lord.’

‘ _Was_?’

‘I mean―we’ll shortly be demobilized, my lord, I hope, and by your leave. The friendships you make in the field―it’s best not to expect that they last.’

‘Fair enough.  Williams is a good sport, tell Gower that.  He got his meed, but you’ve had none. Is there something you’d like?’

What could he say to that?  _Yes, I’d quite like back the land your thrice-great-grandfather stole from my twice-great?_   _Yes, I’d much rather you didn’t order me to bludgeon and stab unarmed men of good birth who have given me their parole?_   ‘No, sir.  I choose freely to serve.’

‘Every subject's duty is the king’s; but every subject’s soul is his own.’ He sounds like he’s quoting something, but Gruffydd, unusually, doesn’t know what. ‘But duty and soul alike are housed in clay, and there’s no escaping that. Unless by winding sheets.’

‘Sheets are certainly involved, my lord.  At both ends of the business, I believe.’

‘I’m serious, Gruffydd.  Whose are our bodies?’

Henry tilts his head stupidly, reminding Gruffydd of a merlin he kept as a pet when he was a small boy; no sort of hawk at all, he never even took a sparrow, and then overnight he caught a chill and died. The King’s eyes are hawk-yellow.  Gower’s eyes are the colour of dry moss, the sort you collect for tinder.  Hopeless and trapped, he gives in.

‘Yours for God only, my lord, and mine for God in you. I would not refuse your commands even if I could.’

Henry has, of course, anticipated that.  ‘What I had in mind mere kings can’t compel.’  He dismisses the remaining attendants with a jerk of his head. ‘Not Nature herself could force a man to it, if he didn’t wish.’

Gruffydd’s mouth is dry.  ‘Sir. I’m not so very well acquainted with the honourable goodwife, look you.’

That seems to amuse him.  ‘Gruffydd, _bach_. You’d hardly be here, if I thought you were.’

He hesitates.  Ever man he has ever loved―he puts the qualifier _until recently_ very firmly behind him―has been his social superior, and most of them have had something of a taste for overwhelm, which he has been only too happy to indulge.  He supposes it makes sense, release from responsibility and care; a certain aristocratic lassitude.  The King can only be _more so_.  He is very tall, taller even than Gower, but much more narrowly made, stringy almost.  He smells sweet―of cumin, garlic and something earthy that Gruffydd doesn’t recognise―this sentiment cannot be reciprocally affirmed, and he wonders just what the hell the King thinks he's going to get out of this, other than lice. 

There’s a still moment before a fight begins.  You have to use it well: not so much to judge your opponent, but to see your way through him.  He runs a deliberate, hard, dirty thumb along the scar, crushing his palm over Henry’s mouth, which emits a soft, urgent gasp at the _lèse-majesté_ of it.  Gruffydd senses the high, clear, steely air of battle, and is joined.

*

Gower’s about to sling his arm around his friend’s shoulder, but something in Fluellen’s hunched posture dissuades him.

‘You've been lying bloody low, mate. Everything all right?  Rough night?’

‘You could say that.’ Fluellen turns a pinched, unhappy face on him.  Misery makes his flat, catlike features look positively weaselly.

‘You’re not still―look here, it doesn’t damn well matter. Not to me, not to Williams, not anyone. Don’t take it so hard.  I feel sorry for the bugger.  You don’t learn how to make a joke properly when nobody’s ever _not_ laughed, if you get me.  He’s a bit of a queerhawk, all right, but it could be a bloody sight worse―barmy, like the French chap―’

‘What the fuck do you know about it, _Sais_?’

There are a thousand obscene names Fluellen could have called him, and he’d have punched his shoulder or grabbed him by the ears and planted a jokey smacker on his brow. Somehow, the bare statement of his nation―his triumphant nation, the nation they’re all supposed to be so goddamned deliriously proud of―is unforgivable.

‘All right, if that’s the way it is.  Be seeing you around. Take care.’

 

**Author's Note:**

> Title: _Henry V_ , IV, viii.
> 
> This is written in the Shakespearean tradition of minimal regard for historical accuracy or authenticity, with liberal application of the 200-year rule, viz. if it exists in the years between the historical setting of the play and Shakespeare's own time, it's fair game. In particular, where there are differences between the early 15th-century army and the late 16th century one, I tend to go for the latter, and iron out backstory difficulties with the convenient assumption of mercenary service. 
> 
> However, Fluellen's reflection on Henry's record at Shrewsbury departs from Shakespearean canon into something more like the historical narrative: the sixteen-year-old Henry probably sustained the wound as the result of leaving his visor up during the initial arrow barrage. Lancastrian chroniclers have him continuing to fight, but the serious nature of the injury makes this unlikely. I've toned down Fluellen's canonical enthusiasm for honorifics, which didn't quite seem to fit with the mood of this story, so he addresses Henry interchangeably as 'sir' or 'my lord'.
> 
> The Welsh history, as usual, is out of my fallible memory, but:
> 
> Gruffydd ap Llewelyn (d.1244) was the first son of Llewelyn ap Iorwerth, or Llewelyn Fawr, 'The Great', and Tangwystl Goch. Gruffydd spent much of his life in hostage situations of one kind or another. He was disinherited in favour of his younger half-brother Dafydd, the son of Llewelyn by Llewelyn's wife Joan, the illegitimate daughter of King John, which led to more imprisonment, as Dafydd rightly feared that Gruffydd had more popular support than he. Gruffydd died as a result of his attempt to escape from the Tower of London: the bedsheet rope he used to climb out of a window apparently was insufficient to hold his weight.
> 
> Dafydd Gam ap Llewelyn (d. 1415) was a supporter of Henry IV in Wales, and an opponent of Owain Glyn Dŵr. He died at Agincourt, as Shakespeare records; and he's often been considered the model for Fluellen. I imagine him as Fluellen's close contemporary and moderately distant kinsman. They don't get along.
> 
> [‘Trafferth mewn tafarn’](http://cy.wikisource.org/wiki/Trafferth_mewn_tafarn) (Trouble in a Tavern) is a burlesque lyric by Dafydd ap Gwilym (c.1320-c.1370). The protagonist successfully chats up a young woman in a pub. On his way to her room, he falls over, barking his shin on a stool. Trying to get up, he bangs his head on and knocks over a trestle table on which are brass pans, which clatter noisily to the ground. This wakes the inn-keeper's dogs, and three English guests, who assume there are burglars on the premises and wake the landlord to make a posse. Our hero hides from them successfully and creeps back to his own bed, mission unaccomplished. The lines Fluellen quotes are the final ones, roughly, 'I escaped, thanks be to the saints / I pray God for forgiveness.'
> 
> bach: an endearment, literally, 'little'
> 
> Sais: Englishman


End file.
